China’s Big Tech companies are escalating their battle for artificial intelligence talent to the level of covert operations. It has now been confirmed, nearly a year later, that the core executive known as the "father of robotics" at ByteDance, who led its robotics research from the ground up, defected to competitor Xiaomi. According to a report by 21st Century Business Herald on the 10th, Kong Tao, who oversaw ByteDance's robotics team, has been leading the foundation model team within Xiaomi's robotics division since the summer of 2025. The reason his move remained shrouded in secrecy for nearly a year is that Kong Tao's organization was kept strictly confidential even within Xiaomi. His team reportedly uses a separate office and members did not show their faces during company-wide executive video conferences. Xiaomi's robotics division itself maintains a high level of internal security. The roughly 200 employees in the division can only see information about their own team and its members, and are reportedly completely unable to access the organizational charts or work details of other teams. Kong Tao, who holds a Ph.D. in computer science from Tsinghua University, joined ByteDance in 2019 and established the company's first robotics research team. Starting with just himself and an intern, he grew the organization to about 100 people by 2024, laying the foundation for ByteDance's robotics business. His doctoral dissertation was nominated for an outstanding dissertation award by the China Association